John Watson: Who put suffix in the stew?

WITH the current enthusiasm for plays written by Aeschylus and Euripides, you would have thought that we would recognise revenge when we see it.

How is it then that when the Sydney Morning Herald described the fourth Ashes cricket test match between England and Australia as "pomicide", the term was not seen for what it was?

This extraordinary new word seems to have a Latin genesis. The Romans (who, for the benefit of the Sydney Morning Herald, were big users of Latin) used "caedere", meaning "to kill", and the English language has borrowed it by adding the suffix "-cide" to indicate the killing or destruction of the thing to which it is added. Hence "patricide" means to kill one's father; "fratricide", means to kill a brother, "hereticide" means to kill a heretic.

The suffix can also be used to denote the person who does the killing or destroying. So those who signed the death warrant of Charles I were known as regicides and the term "suicide" is used for a person who kills themself as well as for the act of killing. In 1886, the London Review used the term "the venerable birdicide" to describe the Ancient Mariner who is best known for having shot an albatross.

Actually it all goes further - the suffix is also used to label the instrument by which the deed is done. So an insecticide is a chemical for killing insects, a fungicide kills people with beards and a pesticide destroys noisy and ill-mannered teenagers. All in all, then, this is a pretty adaptable suffix.

But what the language doesn't allow you to do is to turn it round by inserting, before the suffix "cide", the description of the person doing the killing or destroying.

Thus insecticides are used to kill insects - they are not chemicals with which malignant cockroaches can wipe out the human race. Patricide is committed by killing your father - if he gets his blow in first it will be filicide.

That makes you wonder about "pomicide", which, on orthodox canons of construction, should refer to the killing of Poms and not the destruction of Australian batsmen.

It can be confusing watching a test match but it seems unlikely that even the Herald's sporting journalists will have concluded that the session in which Australia lost all their wickets for 60 runs was an occasion on which they can be described as having slaughtered the opposition.

An explanation is that the cutting edge of language has moved forward by a quantum leap and that the suffix "cide" is now being used in a new sense.

In practice, a new word is used on the streets some time before it is admitted to the dictionary. Perhaps "pomicide", with its revolutionary use of the suffix, is just in that in-between stage.

It is a nice theory but it won't do. I'm sure that some streets in Australia are quite violent but it seems unlikely that the slaughter of Englishmen is now so commonplace that they have invented a special word for it.

As of the morning of August 7, 2015 when the "pomicide" headline appeared, it seems unlikely that the word was in street use. Where then can the Sydney Morning Herald have got it from?

The solution must lie in human nature rather than the study of language. If something you really value is injured - and Australia's reputation for prowess on the cricket field will have been severely damaged - then the instinctive reaction is to spoil something of value to the opposition.

What do the English value? Why, their language, of course - an obvious target.

Imagine then the scene in the Australian cabinet when they heard that their batting had been destroyed. Appropriate revenge was needed and, as Australians are generally better at Greek than they are at Latin (after all they have hosted the Olympics), they probably began looking at the revenge wreaked by Atreus on his wife's lover, Thyestes.

"Yeah, cook their team's children in a stew and serve them up to their parents," they will have said, corks bobbing merrily around their hats. An excellent idea but difficult to do from a range of 10,000 miles.

No, it had to be cleverer than that and it would have to go beyond the team and upset the English nation as a whole. The answer was obvious - murder the language!

By now you won't need Hercule Poirot to tell you that the Sydney Morning Herald was commissioned to carry out the dreadful deed.

John Watson is the editor of the UK weekly online magazine The Shaw Sheet where he writes as 'Chin Chin'.